Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) based on inorganic semiconductors (e.g. AlGaAs) have been developed since the mid-80's (K. Kinoshita et al., IEEE J. Quant. Electron. QE-23, 882 [1987]). They have reached the point where AlGaAs-based VCSELs emitting at 850 nm are manufactured by a number of companies and have lifetimes beyond 100 years (K. D. Choquette et al., Proc. IEEE 85, 1730 [1997]). With the success of these near-infrared lasers in recent years, attention has turned to other inorganic material systems to produce VCSELs emitting in the visible wavelength range (C. Wilmsen et al., Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001). There are many fruitful applications for visible lasers, such as, display, optical storage reading/writing, laser printing, and short-haul telecommunications employing plastic optical fibers (T. Ishigure et al., Electron. Lett. 31, 467 [1995]). In spite of the worldwide efforts of many industrial and academic laboratories, much work remains to be done to create viable laser diodes (either edge emitters or VCSELs), which span the visible spectrum.
In the effort to produce visible wavelength VCSELs, it would be advantageous to abandon inorganic-based systems and focus on organic-based laser systems, since organic-based gain materials can enjoy the properties of low unpumped scattering/absorption losses and high quantum efficiencies. In comparison to inorganic laser systems, organic lasers are relatively inexpensive to manufacture, can be made to emit over the entire visible range, can be scaled to arbitrary size, and most importantly, are able to emit multiple wavelengths (such as red, green, and blue) from a single chip.
The usual route for making a manufacturable laser diode system is to use electrical injection rather than optical pumping to create the necessary population inversion in the active region of the device. This is the case for inorganic systems since their optically pumped thresholds (P. L. Gourley et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 54, 1209 [1989]) for broad-area devices are on the order of 104 W/cm2. Such high power densities can only be achieved by using other lasers as the pump sources, precluding that route for inorganic laser cavities. Unpumped organic laser systems have greatly reduced combined scattering and absorption losses (˜0.5 cm−1) at the lasing wavelength, especially when one employs a host-dopant combination as the active media. As a result, optically pumped power density thresholds below 1 W/cm2 should be attainable, especially when a VCSEL-based microcavity design is used in order to minimize the active volume (which results in lower thresholds). The importance of power density thresholds below 1 W/cm2 is that it becomes possible to optically pump the laser cavities with inexpensive, off-the-shelf, incoherent LED's.
In order to produce multimode milliwatt laser output power from an organic VCSEL device, typically it is necessary to have the diameter of the emitting area be on the order of 10 μm. As a result, 1 mW of output power would require that the device be optically pumped by a source producing ˜4000 W/cm2 (assuming a 25% power conversion efficiency). This power density level (and pixel size) is far beyond the capabilities of LED's and, additionally, would most likely cause some degradation problems with the organic materials if they were driven cw. A path around that problem is to increase the organic laser's emitting area diameter to around 350 μm, which would reduce the pump power density level to 4 W/cm2 (to produce 1 mW of output power). This power density level and pixel size is achievable by off-the-shelf 400 nm inorganic LED's.
Unfortunately, broad-area laser devices having 350 μm diameter emitting areas would lead either to filamented multimode laser output (which is hard to control) or to resonant cavity LED action (which is not lasing). Either way, the power conversion efficiency would be lower.